Sunday, November 28, 2010

The first issue of Bryn Mawr Classical Review was released for internet distribution twenty years ago today. We thank our many colleagues who have joined in the editorial process, our very many colleagues who have reviewed for us, and our many, many readers and friends over the years. There were only a handful of "e-journals" back then, and the only journal in the humanities that is senior to us by a few weeks is Postmodern Culture. We are one of the oldest (if not indeed the very oldest) e-journals to offer complete "open access" (in the jargon that has evolved since), that is, we have made every word of our publication freely available over the net from the first day. We are particularly grateful to another (overlapping!) set of colleagues and friends who have helped produce and make use of our textbook series, Bryn Mawr Commentaries, on whose revenues BMCR depends for its free distribution. (When you assign a Bryn Mawr Commentary, in other words, you support BMCR.)

If you lift a glass in our honor on this anniversary, savor as you do the irony that this grave and senior pioneer of electronic publishing is devoted to chronicling and assessing the publication of the printed book. We do not prophesy the future, when e-books and p-books settle their relations with one another. But we persist.

The Current Scholarship Program (CSP) makes current and historical scholarly content available on a single, integrated platform, providing a single point for librarians and end users around the world to access this content, and ensuring this content's long-term preservation. Faculty and students around the world will be able to access all licensed content on JSTOR — current issues, back issues, and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries — easily and seamlessly.

For the 2011 subscription year, 174 titles from 19 publishers are available via the Current Scholarship Program. Libraries may subscribe to current issues on a Single Title basis or assemble their own custom collections of single titles.

For both Single Title and Collections, JSTOR provides current issue access back to the Digital Availability Date for each title. This date is defined as either: (a) the first online volume published that was also available for purchase by libraries from the publisher (e.g. not an aggregator), or (b) for titles not yet online, the year ahead of the moving wall. This date is fixed so a current subscription grows in content year after year for all subscribers.In addition to current issues, libraries may subscribe to full runs of Single Titles (from Volume 1, Issue 1 to present) and Collections.

Titles in the 2011 JSTOR Current Scholarship Program release relating to the Ancient World include:

Classical Antiquity

University of California Press

ISSN: 0278-6656

EISSN: 1067-8344

The Department of Classics, University of California, Berkeley

The Classical Journal

Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc.

ISSN: 0009-8353

EISSN:

Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc.

Classical Philology

University of Chicago Press

ISSN: 0009-837X

EISSN: 1546-072X

Current Anthropology

University of Chicago Press

ISSN: 0011-3204

EISSN: 1537-5382

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

Isis: An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences

Many SBL Forum readers will have heard about a new online, open-access monograph series. It is called Ancient Near East Monographs / Monografías sobre el Antiguo Cercano Oriente (ANEM/MACO). This is one of several projects that have been spearheaded by the SBL’s International Cooperation Initiative. This new peer-reviewed series publishes volumes on any aspect of the ancient Near East from the Neolithic to the early Hellenistic eras, including works on ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible. The open-access nature of the series means that it is globally available. Moreover, it publishes volumes in English and Spanish and some of its English volumes will be translated into Spanish to reach an even wider readership—the series is a joint project of the SBL and the Centro de Estudios de Historia del Antiguo Oriente (CEHAO) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. The same scholarly standards that apply to any SBL series apply to ANEM/MACO and it is led by an international editorial board comprised of both senior and junior scholars. The series is currently accepting proposals. As a member of the editorial board, my purpose in writing this brief essay is to encourage members of the SBL to submit their series-appropriate manuscripts or proposals.

This issue contains 13 papers from the colloquium, The Book of the Dead - Recent research and new perspectives, held at the British Museum on 21–22 July 2009. The meeting brought together leading scholars working on aspects of the Book of the Dead. Several of their contributions have been influential in the development of the exhibition Journey through the afterlife: ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (4 November 2010 – 6 March 2011).

The papers presented here represent the majority of those that will eventually appear in a hard copy publication, though with more extensive use of colour than will be possible in that volume. Neal Spencer, Elisabeth O'Connell and Liam McNamara edited the papers, with the assistance of John Taylor.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Since the nineteenth century, thousands of cuneiform tablets dating to the Old Babylonian Period (c. 1900-1700 BCE) have come to light at various sites in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). A significant number record mathematical tables, problems, and calculations. In the 1920s these tablets began to be systematically studied by Otto Neugebauer, who spent two decades transcribing and interpreting tablets housed in European and American museums. His labors, and those of his associates, rivals, and successors, have revealed a rich culture of mathematical practice and education that flourished more than a thousand years before the Greek sages Thales and Pythagoras with whom histories of mathematics used to begin.

This exhibition is the first to explore the world of Old Babylonian mathematics through cuneiform tablets covering the full spectrum of mathematical activity, from arithmetical tables copied out by young scribes-in-training to sophisticated work on topics that would now be classified as number theory and algebra. The pioneering research of Neugebauer and his contemporaries concentrated on the mathematical content of the advanced texts; a selection of archival manuscripts and correspondence offers a glimpse of Neugebauer's research methods and his central role in this “heroic age.”

Plimpton 322 reveals that the Babylonians had a method of finding sets of three whole numbers such that the square of one of them is the sum of the squares of the other two, a classic problem in Number Theory. Click here to learn more.

The Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents project (also known as eSAD: e-Science and Ancient Documents) aims to use computing technologies to aid experts in reading ancient documents in their complex task. The four year project, being undertaken at the University of Oxford with input from University College London, is funded under the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative, and will run until the end of 2011.

The project will work on creating tools which can aid the reading of damaged texts like the stilus tabletsVindolanda. Furthermore, the project will explore how an Interpretation Support System (ISS) can be used in the day-to-day reading of ancient documents and keep track of how the documents are interpreted and read. A combination of image processing tools and an ontology based support system will be developed to facilitate experts by tracking their developing hypotheses.

The trilingual Annual Review of Swiss Archaeology publishes the results from current research from various time periods. Furthermore, the most recent discoveries in Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein are presented in short essays. Reviews and an up to date list of publications on archaeological research in Switzerland complete the volume. The annual has been running since 1908 and has since changed its name several times. „Jahresbericht der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte” (title of volume 1, 1908 to volume 29, 1937). „Jahrbuch der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte” (title of volume 30, 1938 to volume 52, 1965). „Jahrbuch der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Ur- und Frühgeschichte” (title of volume 53, 1966/67 to volume 88, 2005). Annual Review of Swiss Archaeology (title of volume 89, 2006 onwards).

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Orientalia Suecana is an international journal of Indological, Iranian, Semitic, Sinological and Turkic studies founded in 1952. As a rule one volume pro year or a double volume pro two years is issued. The journal is published with aid of grants from the Swedish Research council.

Further information about the journal is is available here, its history and plans for the future.

Volume 58 will be the last one published in traditional form. From 2010, the journal will be published online with open access. [6/2/11: See now here]

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.